Sooner or later, we're going to have to talk seriously about the atrocities committed in our name by elements of the United States government, and about the subsequent cover-up of those atrocities by elements of said United States government, only some of which were the same elements of said United States government who committed those atrocities.

"These newly declassified records add new detail to the public record of the CIA's torture program and underscore the cruelty of the methods the agency used in its secret, overseas black sites," said Jameel Jaffer, ACLU deputy legal director. "It bears emphasis that these records document grave crimes for which no senior official has been held accountable." The documents include new records about the death of Gul Rahman, who died at a CIA secret prison in Afghanistan in 2002. The CIA "Death Report" on Rahman released today details the horrific conditions he was subjected to:

"Often, prisoners who possess significant or imminent threat information are stripped to their diapers during interrogation and placed back into their cells wearing only diapers. This is done solely to humiliate the prisoner for interrogation purposes. When the prisoner soils a diaper, they are changed by the guards. Sometimes the guards run out of diapers and the prisoners are placed back in their cells in a handcrafted diaper secured by duct tape. If the guards don't have any available diapers, the prisoners are rendered to their cell nude.

"Rahman froze to death in his cell, naked from the waist down. The ACLU represents Rahman's family in a lawsuit against the two CIA-contracted psychologists who designed and implemented the torture program, James Mitchell and John "Bruce" Jessen.

Most Popular

These two guys are the first ones.

Squeeze them until their eyeballs bleed, or until they give up everything they did and everybody else who directed them and covered up their actions, whichever comes first. (If you need a reason beyond simple humanity, then explain in detail how these two guys betrayed their profession.) I mean, it's not like these people didn't know what they were doing is wrong.

Also included is a draft letter from the CIA to the Justice Department — cc-ing Mitchell — concluding that the torture they intended to inflict on Abu Zubaydah "normally would appear to be prohibited under the provisions" of the Torture Act, a federal law against torturing people. The draft letter is a "request" that the attorney general "grant a formal declination of prosecution" for torture. Other new disclosures reveal the CIA's concerns that detainees who had been tortured should be kept hidden from representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross for the rest of their lives. "We're seeing just how much Mitchell, Jessen, and their CIA co-conspirators knew that what they were doing was wrong and illegal. They talked about seeking a get-out-of-jail-free card for torturing people, and then discussed how to make sure their victims were silenced forever, even if they survived their torture," Ladin added.

In case you were wondering what a tough push up a dirt road getting justice for these people really is, you can look in the documents the ACLU pried loose for the details about an innocent guy who got caught up in this madness.

The documents released today also include a 2007 CIA inspector general's report finding that the kidnapping and torture of German citizen Khalid El-Masri was a case of mistaken identity. The report referenced CIA cables on El-Masri's despair: "The cable cited that al-Masri compared his situation to a Kafka novel—he could not possibly prove his innocence because he did not know what he was being charged with. The cable reported al-Masri as saying he had nearly reached the end of what he could bear and as of May 2004 he would begin a total hunger strike to his death." A 2005 ACLU lawsuit on behalf of El-Masri against former CIA Director George Tenet was dismissed by lower courts on the grounds that it would reveal "state secrets," and the Supreme Court declined to hear the case. The ACLU now represents El-Masri in a pending case against the U.S. before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

The decision of which, I will guarantee you, the American government will ignore, if it goes the wrong way.

If you are one of those people energized by the feeling of being utterly ashamed and revolted, you can read all the documents on which the ACLU is reporting at the CIA website. And it is here that I point out that the presumptive Democratic nominee for president has been all over the map on this issue, but that she seems to have finally lighted on the fringes of the right place.

Meanwhile, the presumptive Republican nominee, a ridiculous man running a ridiculous campaign, has contented himself with being an uninformed maniac on the subject. Presidential campaigns are the machinery within which we litigate something like this in a self-governing republic. But I'll be surprised—stunned, really—if these revelations even come up, except perhaps in abstract form, or perhaps in rueful silence while discussing the "war" on terror. An age of complicity goes on, endlessly, up that endless dirt road.